Inch Street
April 10, 2015
I have a natural bias to think the worst places have the most potential, I’m a born renovator. Inch Street is without doubt one of the worst places in Lithgow, drab, ugly and generally unlovable. When Lithgow Council got a grant from XStrata Coal to fund a cultural study into heritage assets in the town […]
Airly
April 9, 2015
Airly village on Mt Airly in the Capertee Valley is another abandoned shale oil mining village from the late nineteenth century. The pagodas on top of Mt Airly and Canobolas are the most spectacular anywhere in the Gardens of Stone yet they still face destruction by coal mining. It was the prospect of mining Airly […]
Lidsdale House Garden
April 7, 2015
The garden surrounding Lidsdale House was designed by Paul Sorensen. It is lush and manicured. But the 1940s extensions to the house are in a creepy and ominous style. They have an uncanny lost domain feeling that haunted me as I cautiously peeked over the fence as a child. In some strange way they projected […]
Walker Barton Cemetery
April 6, 2015
Lake Wallace was created in 1978 to supply cooling water to Wallerawang power station. The Walker Barton Cemetery on the north side of the lake would have been flooded but the grave markers were removed, the ground level raised by about six metres and then the gravestones reinstalled. So this is not the cemetery it […]
Long Swamp Road
April 6, 2015
I never knew the peculiar stone formations that surrounded me as a child were called pagodas, as if they were buddhist temples. Buddhist literature, which says that pagodas were originally built for the purpose of preserving the remains of Sakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism. According to Buddhist scripture, when Sakyamuni’s body was cremated after his […]